


like you'd get your knuckles bloody

by waxpoetic



Category: Archie Comics & Related Fandoms, Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Betty-centric, But that is NOT what we're here to see, F/M, mentions of Bughead and Varchie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:27:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28412382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waxpoetic/pseuds/waxpoetic
Summary: There were so many choices that felt so small at the time. It seemed as if she blinked while getting a refill of her milkshake at Pop’s and woke up in a forest, covered in her boyfriend’s blood. She had been so many Betties between then - in a bunker, at the farm, chasing down a masked killer, in a black wig, holding Chuck Clayton’s head under water —Standing beneath her porch light, her heart in her throat while Archie Andrews said, “I can’t give you the answer that you want.”Was that the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?--Betty Cooper, before-and-after.
Relationships: Archie Andrews/Betty Cooper
Comments: 7
Kudos: 36





	like you'd get your knuckles bloody

Her sense of narrative structure made her wish it was as easy as a before-and-after.

There was such clarity in a defining moment, in being able to spot the time when everything changed. There was a Cheryl before and after Jason died; a Jughead before and after he slipped on the Serpent jacket; the Breakfast at Tiffany’s Veronica before she turned In Cold Blood.

There was no clean before-and-after for Betty Cooper. There were so many choices that felt so small at the time. It seemed as if she blinked while getting a refill of her milkshake at Pop’s and woke up in a forest, covered in her boyfriend’s blood. She had been so many Betties between then - in a bunker, at the farm, chasing down a masked killer, in a black wig, holding Chuck Clayton’s head under water —

Standing beneath her porch light, her heart in her throat while Archie Andrews said, “I can’t give you the answer that you want.”

Was that the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?

——

The old Betty, wherever she began and ended, was characterized by her discipline.

Every day, she suited up in her prim cardigans and slick ponytail, ready for another day as the dutiful daughter, the doting sister, the star student. She could handle any pop quiz, any turbulence in the Cooper household, any pressing deadlines at the Blue and Gold. When the pressure got to be too much, she would clench her fists and breathe through it.

And every night, she looked out her bedroom window at what she really wanted. Second floor, second window from the back, calling to her like a lighthouse. Archie’s window was lit up at all hours of the day and night, whether he was strumming his guitar or dozing off with a movie on. It was her nightlight. She fell asleep to its comforting glow, knowing their time would come one day.

She had to be disciplined, because she was hungry. Sometimes it scared her, how strongly she felt. There was a bottomless pit of want inside of her and she tiptoed around it, testing the edges but never letting herself fall in. Betty didn’t want to be the kind of person who was dragged around by her id. She wanted to be the person that other people thought she was. Sometimes that meant sleepless nights helping Polly learn her cheer routine, piling more volunteer hours on top of her already packed schedule, turning the other cheek to another Blossom insult.

 _Season five Betty Draper_ , Cheryl had once called her, as if she knew the half of it.

——

Betty had never thought Archie would love her in the exact way that she loved him.

She knew that love took different shapes in each container. She could see the way her mother and father fit together, pushing and pulling but ultimately a team, making each other better - a real laugh, in retrospect. One of her favorite memories was being eight years old, when Alice had just broken a big story. The pride lit her up from the inside and Hal’s beaming face reflected it right back. But she had also watched from next door as the Andrews fell apart. Fred and Mary lost something that seemed sweet and steady and kind, and then Fred puttered around that big house alone.

She thought about what that love might feel like, when it finally came.

Archie was all sweetness. Being his girlfriend would mean never walking to school alone, sporting his letterman jacket at games, and dancing together at prom. It would be afternoons working on a jalopy in the garage and nights cuddling together on the sofa. He would write songs about her and she would proofread his college essays and they would move to New York together after graduation.

It would be an awful lot like being his friend had been since they turned 13 and their parents had put a moratorium on sleepovers, except that she would get to touch the abs that had been taunting her. The heart that beat under those defined pectoral muscles was pure gold and it was an even better prize.

Something murkier lay beneath the surface for Betty. Sometimes she wondered if she loved him or if she coveted him. She wanted to know every thought in his head, every dream in his heart. Long before the school hallways had started to echo with _Archie got hot!_ , she had been daydreaming about ways to get his hands on her. There were no dibs on a person, but she saw him first and had seen only him since.

Betty had never thought that Archie would burn for her, but she basked in his steady glow. Archie lived closer to the surface - he wore his heart on his sleeve and an easy smile on his face. That was one of the things she loved about him. They would be so happy together, but his devotion would never match hers.

It wasn’t until she was standing at the edge of a shallow grave, looking down at his terrified, resolved face with a shovel in her hand and a gun to her head, that she realized they may have misjudged each other.

——

A dam had broken in Betty Cooper earlier that fall.

It could have been one thing or any number of things —Veronica Lodge sweeping into town, Polly’s mysterious disappearance, Jason Blossom’s body washing up in Sweetwater River. It was an unusually active September, especially by Riverdale’s sleepy standards.

For Betty, it felt like the foundation had been cracking. With one firm tap, it was gone.

_You are so perfect. I’ve never been good enough for you, I’ll never be good enough for you._

The careful balancing of what she should want versus what she did want is what had kept her in check for all these years. No one else seemed to have the same qualms. Betty couldn’t imagine Cheryl or Veronica denying themselves a thing. In fact, she knew they wouldn’t. Veronica had talked a big game about turning over a new leaf, but after less than a week in Riverdale, Veronica had seven minutes in a closet and Betty had a box of Magnolia cupcakes.

Only Betty had the discipline to decide to be something and then become it. It had gotten harder for her to see how that was a good thing.

— —

Jughead’s interest in Betty was both a balm and a sting.

Boys had never been interested in her. She wasn’t sure if it was because word of her strict parents preceded her or because her crush on Archie was so obvious that it was not worth getting their hopes up. Whatever the reason, she had made it sixteen years without being asked to the drive-in, having a note slipped in her locker, or having rocks thrown at her window by someone who wanted to date her. She did all those things with her best friend and had become aware that it was not the same.

Until Jughead crawled through her window and gave her her first real kiss, she didn’t realize exactly how different it was.

Being on the other side of the equation was a revelation. It was amazing to think that there was someone who liked her more than anyone else, who thought about her when she wasn’t around, who wanted to kiss her and hold her hand and maybe more one day. Jughead was a good person - he was cute and smart, with a wicked sense of humor that tickled at the dark side she kept such a lid on - but what made him special is that he thought she was special. Betty had never come first to anyone before and she dove into intimacy with the same enthusiasm and determination that she put into any task.

But it was her way to acknowledge the cloud even while she focused on the silver lining. Besides her, Jughead was Archie’s best friend in the world. If other boys had avoided her due to some unspoken claim, surely he would find her to be even further off limits. If Jughead liked her, it was because Archie never would.

Somehow it was more devastating than the rejection itself. A dramatic showdown in formalwear still fit with the narrative that she had imagined for Archie-and-Betty. Power couples faced obstacles. Even after homecoming, even after Melody, even after Veronica, a part of her still though she should be patient. It was the utter lack of drama in her courtship with Jughead that made it real. There was nothing to be dramatic about.

She made her peace with it, first with her nails dug into her palms but then genuinely. The pieces of her heart felt like they were rearranging. Jughead had burst his way in and made his home right in the center. The part that housed her feelings for Archie was smaller, but the scars had made the walls thick and tough.

She would always love him and now she knew what shape it would take. She felt lucky to have enough love in her life that she could feel the difference.

It took a few months, but Betty started to think Jughead might be her soulmate. They both felt a personal obligation to clean up Riverdale’s seedy underbelly, loved books and old movies, and, most importantly, they hated the same things about her. On his lips, “perfect” was scornful. After all of those years pursuing perfection, she wasn’t too fond of it herself.

——

People gave you a wide berth in the aftermath of a showdown with a killer.

Betty was distracted and distant in the weeks following the altercation with Joseph Svenson. People around town stared and whispered even more than usual, but they looked at her with pity and awe in their eyes. Even her mother and Jughead gave her space, assuming that she was reeling after weeks of cat-and-mouse.

When she was alone, Betty didn’t think about Joseph Svenson at all. She thought about Archie Andrews.

It wasn’t about the kiss, although it was hardly the one she had scripted for them long ago. She thought about the way that he had grabbed her hand as she put the pieces together and started to spiral, the only thing tethering her to this earth. She thought about how instantly he had responded to _Get in the coffin or I’ll shoot her in the head right now_.

To be willing to die for someone was the kind of sweeping statement of love and dedication that was easy to say because it was so unlikely to be tested. It was reserved for the most important people in your life, the ones that you would do anything to protect. When she was in danger, Archie hadn’t batted an eye. When she closed her eyes, all she could see was him lowering himself into a _coffin_ for her. She had been looking at that face for years and years, had known it when it had a beaming smile of mismatched baby teeth, had admired its changing angles. His jaw was clenched but his eyes were as warm as ever when the lid closed over him. 

It was unbelievable to think that only weeks ago, kisses and milkshakes had made her feel special. It wasn’t fair to hold up a high school romance against the ultimate sacrifice, but the tectonic plates of her life had shifted again. It was a secret humming under her skin. It was heady to know that there was someone in the world who would do anything for you.

In a way, the showdown with the Black Hood was the most romantic night of her life. That was Riverdale for you.

— —

Betty stopped thinking about Hal Cooper almost as soon as he was locked away. She had spent so much time pouring over the Black Hood and puzzling over her family secrets that when she tried to align the man with the father, none of the pieces fit quite right anymore. After the loss of Hal and Polly, the Cooper family structure coalesced neatly around Betty and Alice as if it had always just been them.

Compartmentalizing and moving on was another discipline that Betty excelled at. Most of the time, anyway.

She thought about Fred Andrews all the time. The lights were out in Archie’s room for the first time that she could remember, but she knew that he was home. The loss was unspeakable, so she never tried.

— —

Even for someone good at compartmentalizing, it could be hard for Betty to separate the way she felt about Veronica from how she felt about _Veronica Lodge_.

The simple truth is that they were friends because Veronica had decided they were friends. Betty had been skeptical but a little bit flattered. She had written Veronica off at first, sure that she would move on and nestle in at Cheryl's side like two rich bitch peas in a pod, but she had persisted. 

No one had ever wanted to be her friend that desperately. Despite what her frilly pink sweaters might imply, she had never been much of a girl’s girl. Her only real friends were Archie and Kevin. That had always been more than enough for her, but there was something to be said for having Veronica in her corner.

But the only person better at compartmentalizing than Betty was Veronica Lodge. Veronica could claim that she was destined to be Betty’s best friend while snatching her lifelong crush out from under her. She could disavow her family’s shady business dealings, then join Lodge Industries and keep quiet about their plans for the Southside. She could love Archie, then sit by while her father destroys his life.

Betty had been tap dancing around questions of morality for a while. One did not get to make too many principled stances when their boyfriend was a gang leader who once partially skinned a woman, and she tried not to throw too many stones from inside a house where she had once blackmailed Cheryl Blossom into testifying on behalf of FP Jones. As she started to shed more and more of her Nice Girl persona, Betty thought she had become more understanding of all the gray in the world.

In a sweltering court room after Labor Day weekend, Betty had found the thing she could never forgive. She watched stupid - noble, self-sacrificing, _stupid_ \- Archie jump at a plea deal for a crime he had not committed, all to spare them another trial. Veronica had cried and dropped her head into her hands, but Betty could still see flickers of her in Hiram Lodge’s satisfied smile.

Betty held her friend as she cried and clamped down on her latest intrusive thought - _none of this would be happening if it weren’t for you_. From learning to read to wrestling him from Ms. Grundy’s clutches, there had never been a problem Betty could not solve for Archie until he crossed Hiram’s path. There was nothing Betty wouldn't do for Archie, but there was nothing she could do for him now, so she averted her teary eyes and tried not to let in the darkness that always seemed so close to the surface now. 

Meeting Veronica Lodge was the worst thing that had ever happened to any of them.

— —

When Betty used to dream of Archie as the leading man in every romance, she had imagined kissing him with a frequency that made her blush to think about even now.

She had been inexperienced and was not even sure what she was longing for. In her mind’s eye, she saw him in everything -the foot pop at the end of The Princess Diaries, the foggy window in Titanic, on the dock in The Notebook - hell, even Spiderman dangling upside down in the rain. It was a collage of images that she could not quite attach a sensation to, but it made her blood run a bit hotter.

When Betty tried to flesh out her fantasies, she relied on a few tangible things she did know - the smell of his cologne, which she had picked out; his increasingly hard biceps, flexing under her fingers when they linked arms on the way to school; the way his hair felt when she playfully ruffled it; the slow drag of his fingers across her back and stomach, when he was winding up to tickle her.

It was almost like an out of body experience when she flung the microphone to the ground. Betty was somewhere else in the garage as she and Archie sang, circling the microphone, their traded glances growing less playful and more searching, until he swung the guitar behind his back and reached for her.

The touch of his hand was like it had always been, the tether that held her to earth and made sure she didn’t miss a thing. Betty had never been more present. After all those years of patience and restraint, she couldn’t get close enough.

— —

There was no clear before-and-after for Archie Andrews.

He had come a long way from being the boy-next-door. He had been the star football player and the sensitive musician. He had been groomed by his music teacher and apprenticed at the foot of a mobster. He had started a youth center for the underprivileged and shattered his hand pulling Cheryl Blossom out of a frozen river. It felt like a lifetime ago that it had just been Betty and Archie in a booth at Pop’s, but Betty didn’t feel like he had changed at all. When she looked into his eyes, she saw the same person staring back at her that she always had.

When there was such a bone-deep understanding, how could she ever feel like he was different? With every step he took, she was right there too.

It dawned on Betty that maybe her before-and-after had happened long before she started looking for it. There was a Betty Cooper before she loved Archie Andrews and she had been living in the after since she was 11 years old.

She flipped through her diaries, years and years of little choices. Her next one felt big. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! You can find me fandom lurking on twitter as wax_poetic_


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